Nokia reportedly planning to sell Qt as more developers are laid off

Nokia has shut down the Qt offices in Australia, which were responsible for QML.

Nokia is shutting down its Qt offices in Australia, laying off the team that was responsible for developing key parts of the open source development toolkit, including the QML user interface layout system.

Nokia developer Lorn Potter was part of the Qt team in Australia and posted a message about the layoffs on the Qt community mailing list. He intends to continue working on the toolkit himself, but he is currently seeking new employment opportunities.

Former Nokia software engineer Atlant Schmidt posted a follow-up message on the mailing list thread saying that information he obtained from an unnamed source suggests that Nokia is actively looking to sell its Qt assets, effectively ending the company’s ownership of the toolkit.

Qt provides a sophisticated C++ framework for cross-platform mobile and desktop application development. It was originally created by Norwegian software company Trolltech, which was acquired by Nokia in 2008. Nokia transitioned Qt to an open governance model that has made the project more inclusive and open to independent contributors. Nokia also relicensed the open source version of the toolkit, moving it from the GPL to the more permissive LGPL.

But recent changes in Nokia’s platform strategy have raised serious questions about the company’s long-term commitment to Qt. Nokia originally intended to put Qt at the center of its third-party developer landscape, using it to provide a unified set of APIs that would work across the company’s Symbian and MeeGo devices.

Nokia’s decision to abandon MeeGo and Symbian in favor of adopting Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 left the company with little need for a mobile C++ development framework. Despite the major change in strategy, Nokia still continued to invest resources in the Qt technology stack.

Qt enthusiasts widely believed that Nokia still intended to use the toolkit in some capacity, possibly on a next-generation Linux platform (codenamed Meltemi) for low-cost handsets aimed at developing markets. That Linux platform effort was apparently gutted in Nokia’s last round of aggressive layoffs, raising new questions about what Nokia intends to do with Qt.

It’s likely that the rumor of an imminent Qt sell-off is true. Michael Larabel of Phoronix wrote this morning that statements from his own sources corroborate the information that Schmidt revealed on the mailing list. According to Phoronix, Nokia is waiting until after the official release of Qt 5.0 before it makes its move.

Qt 5.0 represents a major overhaul of the toolkit. It will make JavaScript a first class citizen and establish QML as the standard mechanism for building Qt user interfaces. Qt 5.0 was originally supposed to be released in June, but the final release date was pushed back into August to allow for further polishing. It could see its official release by the end of the month.

It’s worth noting that the transition to an open governance model will insulate Qt from collapsing in the event that Nokia withdraws its support. There are a number of other companies that are actively involved in Qt development, including RIM, which is using Qt as the standard development toolkit for its next-generation Blackberry platform.

There are also a multitude of major Qt adopters, ranging from Dreamworks to Adobe, that have an interest in ensuring that the toolkit is properly maintained. Digia purchased the Qt commercial licensing and support business from Nokia last year and is also committed to the toolkit. Digia could possibly be a candidate for acquiring the rest of the Qt assets.

Qt also has a large following in the open source software ecosystem. The community behind the KDE project recently issued a statement that outlines its views on the future of the Qt development toolkit. The group says that it will continue to use and contribute to Qt as it has in the past and that it will collaborate with other stakeholders to protect the toolkit’s future.

The KDE community uses Qt to build a popular desktop environment for Linux and a cross-platform suite of desktop software. The KDE project relies heavily on the capabilities of Qt, so the fate of the toolkit has obvious implications for KDE as a project. The group’s statement, which was published by openSUSE community manager and KDE volunteer Jos Poortvliet, sheds light on how the KDE community views the situation and how it will respond.

As the statement explains, Nokia is bound by an agreement that Trolltech signed with the KDE Free Qt Foundation which stipulates that the foundation has the right to release the Qt source code under the terms of the permissive BSD license in the event that development under the current licensing terms ceases. The agreement remains valid even if the assets are sold to other parties.

There is no question that Qt will continue to be actively developed on some level regardless of what Nokia chooses to do with the assets. There are a number of risks, however. Without Nokia’s leadership and investment, the toolkit could become fragmented (if a major stakeholder like RIM decides to fork the toolkit, for example) or development could slow down. The Qt community has weathered the turbulence of Nokia’s shifting strategy well, but the changes that are coming could pose new challenges.

Maybe it's best that they are selling it off so it has a chance at survival. Maybe Canonical will buy it, since Unity is kinda important to them and it's built on QT. While some hate unity, it has actually matured quite rapidly and is rather customisable.

Nokia is losing money and QT offered nothing to nokia at this point. Windows phone 8 doesn't use qt and Nokia has already moved away from meego so why so they waste money developing something that doesn't help them?

QT was dead the moment Nokia switched to WP8. The only reason people used QT because they thought it would be the next big thing that would make it easier for them to develop mobile/desktop/tablet applications simultaneously. Most desktop users use Windows/Ubuntu/OSX none of who support the tool kit out of the box. Most mobile and tablet users use Android/iOS which doesn't support QT. Whats the point of using a toolkit when you can only use it for a niche market (kde linux OSes)?

I imagine that over time its importance to these groups will diminish and other ways of doing what they need will be used.

RIM isn't in such good position itself now, and Adobe needs to have a way to make money from this or they will leave it too. Every commercial venture needs to find this to be something they would be increasing their earnings with in some way, or they will leave it.

QT was dead the moment Nokia switched to WP8. ... Whats the point of using a toolkit when you can only use it for a niche market (kde linux OSes)?

Niche products like ... Spotify, VLC Player and Google Earth Desktop. Contradictions and misinformation - either it's cross platform (desktops included) or it isn't. There's also an Android port on the way.

Most desktop users use Windows/Ubuntu/OSX none of who support the tool kit out of the box. Most mobile and tablet users use Android/iOS which doesn't support QT. Whats the point of using a toolkit when you can only use it for a niche market (kde linux OSes)?

Desktop applications only need to include the Qt libs. On windows this means the dlls, on OSX it is in the .App bundle and Linux via package manager dependencies.

There is also an installer for Qt on Android. iOS and WP8 are another story however (WP8 is still fairly irrelevant...we'll see what happens in the future).

A shame. Qt is good stuff by all accounts. Unfortunately, no platform owner will want to support a cross-platform library, and Nokia seems effectively to be owned by Microsoft now as far as their platform strategy is concerned.

"There are a number of other companies that are actively involved in Qt development, including RIM"

Well thats comforting.

I had the same thought.

This hurts because QT has such an ardent fanbase. It's a really great product, created and supported by a really great group of developers. The good news for those guys, of course, is that a lot of their customers will jump at the chance to have their very own in-house QT developer for support and maintenance of the software. That is, at least until they can find another platform to move to.

Saw this coming, despite the repeated affirmation to unnerving developers from Nokia that Qt will not be abandoned when Nokia switched to win phone. You just need to trust your sense instead of the corporation lines.

QT sell-off is to become another great opportunity for new investment, it will probably be sold for far less than its real technical value. I see it as a great opportunity as it was for Mono developers to claim independency and go all in for Xamarin.

Nokia has changed and the best for QT is to be gotten by an entity that knows its real value and that is absolutely sure of how important is to evolve this toolkit, which includes _not_ shifting to a closed source approach.

So, I have good hopes for QT and no, I don't feel sorry for Nokia. They've lost their chance, now it's time for new blood. Remember, QT is far from dead.

"Nokia's Microsoft-planted beancounter-CEO reportedly planning to sell anything someone wants to buy as more developers are laid off in preparation of the planned bankruptcy and subsequent handover of its top-notch hardware division and distribution arms to Microsoft."

With Microsoft running the show at Nokia it didn't make sense for Qt to stay there. I give it a 30/70 chance that the new owner is better than Nokia used to be or Trolltech was. The biggest fear is that development slows just enough to cripple Qt over time but not enough to enable KDE's right to take the tool set open under the BSD license. My choice of new overload would be Google but they have a lot on their plate and lean more java these days. Mind you Larry has been pissing them off lately.

That's unfortunate. Hopefully Qt doesn't get hobbled by this. It is a fantastic toolkit. I went from knowing zero QML to having a functioning reimplementation of HyperPin in about two days. The table launcher was harder than the GUI parts. And zero C++ was involved, all QML/JavaScript and a bit of PyQt glue.

I know Microsoft has a huge not-invented-here problem, but they would be most helped by having Qt on all the mobile platforms. It would entice developers to use Qt on Android or iOS (pshaw, as if Apple will ever allow that!), thus enabling an easy port to all the others. Great for developers, great for the 4th place OS.

Unfortunately, good sense is not something that exists in the corporate world these days. Lock in seems to be the buzzword of the mobile ecosystem. It's really too bad the press (including Ars) refused to give Symbian a fair shake even after Nokia had gotten the problems worked out, instead preferring to hammer on Symbian and Nokia at every opportunity and ensuring that we get stuck with the relatively closed systems we have now. At least Android is kinda-sorta-open.

Nokia is losing money and QT offered nothing to nokia at this point. Windows phone 8 doesn't use qt and Nokia has already moved away from meego so why so they waste money developing something that doesn't help them?

QT was dead the moment Nokia switched to WP8. The only reason people used QT because they thought it would be the next big thing that would make it easier for them to develop mobile/desktop/tablet applications simultaneously. Most desktop users use Windows/Ubuntu/OSX none of who support the tool kit out of the box. Most mobile and tablet users use Android/iOS which doesn't support QT. Whats the point of using a toolkit when you can only use it for a niche market (kde linux OSes)?

You can package Qt support directly into Android apps. Though it's not entirely mature at this point, it appears to work fine. Not sure about iOS. Adding the Qt framework to a Windows or *Nix box is about the same as adding Adobe Flash support to your browser. You download the framework and install. It's not terribly difficult for programs to go ahead and download and install the framework themselves if it's not found on the system in question.

But yes, Qt was dead once Nokia switched to WP. WP was probably still a better bet for Nokia than their other options long term. They could try to compete with Samsung, LG, and Motorola in the Android landscape. They could have kept going with Meego. They could have kept Symbian on life support. All of these were pretty bad options to go forward except perhaps playing in the Android field for a couple years until WP took off, but I get the feeling their contracts and support with Microsoft would have been a bit more difficult to swing.

It saddens me to see what has happened to Qt and Trolltech. I started using Qt from version 1.4 and thought it was a major improvement over other C++ GUI toolkits. I am a Norwegian living in Oslo, so Trolltech was one of the biggest and coolest C++ development places to work in Norway. It kind of upset me at the time, that a very promising Norwegian tech company got bought out by a big multinational before it got the chance to become really big on its own. This has happened pretty much at every Norwegian tech company I have worked. It sucks even more then that Nokia in many ways have screwed up the company. Now that everything is LGPL, I don't think they can be as profitable as before. Less companies will need a commercial license.

All the focus on mobile development that Nokia brought has largely been a distraction for Qt. Most Qt customers now and in the future will be Companies building large visualization, engineering etc software on the desktop that is cross platform.

Being sold out of Nokia can of course offer a new opportunity for growth. It might be possible to refocus on the desktop. I think the mobile dev space race is over. Google and Apple won that for now, until there are perhaps some major new paradigm shift that comes around.

> If I was a betting man, I'd wager that Autodesk would be interested in keeping Qt alive.

Maybe, but I'd bet that a company that decides to use a third party cross platform application development framework rather than write their own does so because they don't want to write their own. Why would they want to now?

I really have no idea what Autodesk's relationship to Qt is, but it seems rare that any company is interested in ramping up their involvement in a collaborative effort at a time when the principal developers are ending theirs. They would do it because their strategic direction demands more control over the cross platform layer and this is their chance to get it. Who is that, exactly?

If the dev team is already disbanded, what's the value in buying QT vs. just making your own fork?

I suppose you gain some legitimacy as the "official" fork, but just ask Oracle how much that's worth.

Without buying QT, they (ie. the hypothetical would-be QT purchaser) would presumably be forced on only offer LGPL QT. They would not be allowed to offer a special commercial license like Nokia currently offers.

> If I was a betting man, I'd wager that Autodesk would be interested in keeping Qt alive.

Maybe, but I'd bet that a company that decides to use a third party cross platform application development framework rather than write their own does so because they don't want to write their own. Why would they want to now?

I really have no idea what Autodesk's relationship to Qt is, but it seems rare that any company is interested in ramping up their involvement in a collaborative effort at a time when the principal developers are ending theirs. They would do it because their strategic direction demands more control over the cross platform layer and this is their chance to get it. Who is that, exactly?

Well, they might because without it everything else falls apart, and there aren't any current alternatives. I'd say they chose to use Qt rather than write the framework from scratch but all the hardest work is done already.

That being said, it would seem to make sense for AutoDesk, Adobe, and even Apple to form a partnership (or some co-owned subsidiary) to continue development as an independent entity guided by the biggest patrons. All three make a crapload of money from products that rely on Qt (Apple, because that is one of the major reasons there are cross platform applications to run on their hardware). But Digia might be the best option since they have a real monetary interest in improvement and widespread adoption.

There is absolutely NO WAY that Apple would be interested in Qt. I have no reason to believe they would want to invest in it in anyway.

I was also hoping that Nokia would be the one to make Qt more popular ..... before they decided to go Windows Phone OS.

RIM is too weak financially to be able to make any useful contributions.

How about Sony?I guess, Sony could buy Qt and RIM and become independent of Android and perhaps Windows over the long term and base all their future computing devices on RIM's QNX and Qt. I have no idea what OS is used in Playstation, but Sony should build a OS that they can use in PS4, their phones and their desktops and laptops and TVs and Camcorders etc ... kinda like Apple leverages OS X in various forms across all their devices. I am actually surprised they do not already have one by now.

Any investment has to come from corporations that use Cross platform toolkit in their major products. I do not know if AutoDesk has any. How about Steam? Does anyone know if they use Qt for their cross platform products?

I'm pretty confident that Qt will survive this. The pace of development of new features might slow down, but too many developers have too much invested in Qt-based software for it to just die off (at least in the short to medium term. In the long-term, nothing is ever certain). If it was proprietary and at the mercy of one single company to decide its fate, then it might die, but it's open source, so if all else fails, someone will fork it and continue to maintain it for a while.

I'm actually a bit surprised that Nokia held onto it this long after ditching Meego. It really doesn't seem like they had any use for it after that, since one of the main draws of Qt is that it is cross-platform. Nokia was only supporting one mobile OS (which doesn't support Qt), and they don't really produce much in the way of desktop software that I know of (other than Qt Creator, which they give away free to support Qt development).

Owning Qt made a lot of sense when they were developing a Qt-based mobile OS. Owning Qt makes very little sense if they're just manufacturing phones running someone else's (non-Qt supporting) mobile OS.

Qt made particular sense when their plan was to scale Symbian down to "featurephone" while using Maemo/Meego as their smartphone platform. This would in theory allowed them to develop apps for both at the same time.

There is absolutely NO WAY that Apple would be interested in Qt. I have no reason to believe they would want to invest in it in anyway.

Any investment has to come from corporations that use Cross platform toolkit in their major products. I do not know if AutoDesk has any. How about Steam? Does anyone know if they use Qt for their cross platform products?

jes

Well, Apple has incentive since a large number of high profile applications are on OS X because Qt facilitates it-if Autodesk doesn't have to create a whole new interface )and all that fun code) for Maya, it gets a lot easier to justify the port. But without a solid Qt, it might not be financially worthwhile, which then has the knock-on of reducing Apple's sales.

Typically, Apple has incentive to do a lot of things that they could do, if they wanted to. Usually they have a stronger incentive to concentrate engineering resources on what they already do, and make something new up to do every now and then, rather than do these other things they could do, like help pay the life support bill for Qt.

They couldn’t even keep their own Java implementation on Mac OS X patched, something they touted more than 10 years ago as an integral part of Mac OS X, a first class Cocoa citizen alongside Objective-C. For something that provides a run time within most web browsers and is enabled by default increasing the total number of possible attack vectors while not even keeping it patched, the results were painfully predictable.

So what makes you think they would bother to support Qt in any capacity? More likely their rationale, if they even bother to have one at all concerning anything to do with Qt, would be something along the lines of “Developers that choose to make use of cross-platform libraries can take care of their own tools, we have better things to do.”